In communication systems and/or networks, data is delivered from a transmitting station to a receiving station via a communications path and/or channel. Due to, for example, noise and/or interference present on the communication path and/or channel, the communications path and/or channel has a non-zero probability of, for instance, introducing an error into or loss of any given portion (e.g., packet, block, etc.) of received data. In many communication systems and/or networks some form of error correction is utilized that allows the receiving station to detect and/or correct one or more introduced errors and/or recover lost data. For example, a communication system and/or network may employ systematic forward error correction (FEC) that transmits a finite set of original data symbols (e.g., bytes, bits, etc.) together with a finite sequence of check and/or redundancy symbols (i.e., additional symbols) that are, generally, computed from the finite set of original data symbols. The original data symbols and the additional symbols are collectively referred to as an error correction codeword. The number of additional symbols determines the number of introduced errors and/or lost data that may be detected, corrected and/or recovered by the receiving station. While the inclusion of the additional symbols reduces the instantaneous throughout of a system and/or network, its inclusion increases the overall throughput by allowing some errors to be corrected and/or recovered and, thus, may eliminate the need for retransmission of data.
FEC may be implemented using any of a variety of techniques, for example, Reed-Solomon codes, Tornado codes, Low Density Parity Check (LDPC), Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC), etc. Additionally, FEC may be implemented using any set of parameters. For example, FEC may be applied with different amounts of redundancy (e.g., the number of additional transmitted symbols computed from the original data), with different block sizes (e.g., the number of original data symbols per codeword), different methods of computing the additional symbols from the original data (e.g., different polynomials), utilization of interleaving, etc. The selection of the FEC technique and/or parameters may depend upon the characteristics of, for example, one or more of a particular communication service being provided (e.g., data rate), a type of communication path and/or channel (e.g., wireless, wired, satellite, etc.), a type and/or amount of noise and/or interference, etc. Further, FEC decoding may be implemented using any of a variety of techniques. For example, using erasure decoding, etc.